Yes, Rick Perry still hates Medicaid

The Texas rhetoric around a key facet of federal health reform — whether the state will expand subsidized insurance to its poorest adults — reached the high water mark on Monday, with back-to-back press conferences at the Capitol featuring political leaders on both sides of the aisle.

Republicans including U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, Gov. Rick Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and members of a conservative think tank gathered first, reaffirming their opposition to expanding Medicaid, a key tenet of “Obamacare” that is widely supported by Democrats. The expansion — and in particular, the flexibility the federal government has shown some Republican-led states in implementing it — has in recent months drawn the support of some fiscal conservatives reluctant to pass up billions of federal dollars and the opportunity to curb Texas’ ranks of the uninsured.

“For those states buying into this, they will come to rue the day,” Cruz said.

“When the federal government retreats,” Cornyn added, “the state’s going to be on the hook.”

[…]

Republican lawmakers want the Obama administration to give Texas a block grant for Medicaid, which the state would use to subsidize private health savings accounts for low-income recipients. Medicaid recipients would either enroll in a Medicaid managed care plan or be given subsidies on a sliding scale based on their income. The state would also likely include “personal responsibility” measures, such as higher co-pays for patients who went to the emergency room for minor ailments.

Perry said federal leaders need to “decide if they trust” Texas to run Medicaid as the state sees fit, and called the Obama administration “harder to deal with than previous administrations.” But when asked whether he, Cruz or Cornyn had reached out to begin negotiations with the Obama administration on ways to reform Medicaid with federal dollars, Perry said that was the job of the Legislature and the state’s health and human services commissioner.

Did I mention that Perry would make bogus claims about the feds not negotiating in good faith? Why yes, I did. It’s really very simple – Perry, Dewhurst, Abbott, Cornyn, Cruz, the poo-flinging nihilists at the TPPF, they don’t want to help anyone who doesn’t have access to health care. They could not care less about these people. It’s not about the money, it’s not about compassion (since none of them have any), it’s about ideology. They could not be any clearer about this.

Note, by the way, the cloistered nature of Perry’s gathering of the elites, which includes lobbyists but no one who is or would be affected by the decision to expand Medicaid. Now contrast that to some of the people who are affected by that decision.

The county judges of Texas’ most populous counties, as well as the Chambers of Commerce of most of Texas’ largest cities, have endorsed Medicaid expansion as a means of paying for health care in a state with the highest number of uninsured individuals in the country. Without it, they say local taxpayers foot the bill as poor people seek care in expensive emergency room settings.

Some of those people came to the Capitol as well, though they weren’t invited to Perry’s little conclave.

Democrats in Congress and the Legislature, uninsured parents, the head of the state’s main hospital trade group and top local officials in Dallas and San Antonio urged state GOP leaders Monday to negotiate with the Obama administration to expand Texas’ Medicaid program for the poor.

“The public hires us not to do the ideological thing but the smart thing,” said San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro.

Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said it’s unacceptable to leave a large bloc of the population relying on safety net hospitals’ emergency rooms for care when their maladies could receive earlier attention and treatment.

“Do we want to insure the 1.5 million uninsured Texans that need this primary care and are eligible under the expansion population?” he said. “It’s time to put politics aside and stand up to the extremist factions of political parties and work together on the local, state and federal level to find a plan that fits the unique needs of struggling Texans and expands our Texas economy.”

[…]

Ofelia Zapata, an Austin housewife and mother, said her husband is an uninsured laborer who works long hours but can’t afford private coverage. And yet he makes too much to qualify for Medicaid, said Zapata, who is a leader of the Industrial Areas Foundation group Austin Interfaith.

She cast the policy question in moral and religious terms.

“As a Roman Catholic, we believe in dignity of a human person and demands that we stand in solidarity with the poor,” she said. “We must therefore expand Medicaid for Texas families.”

I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Zapata, but Rick Perry and his cronies don’t care about you. They don’t care what people like Ed Emmett and the Lubbock Chamber of Commerce think. They don’t care about the lives that would be saved by expanding Medicaid, because being “pro-life” has nothing to do with living people. They don’t care what a bunch of protesters think. (There are pictures here and here if you care what they think.)

Oh, and just so we’re clear, this full-on opposition to the Affordable Care Act in general and Medicaid expansion in particular is strong evidence that the GOP’s ballyhooed efforts to “re-brand” themselves and reach out to Latino voters is just so much hot air. Latinos strongly support the Affordable Care Act. In general, Latinos and other voters of color support a much more robust role for government, which kind of complicates the whole “small government/starve the beast” message the GOP has to offer. In addition, the bulk of uninsured Texans are Latino. These are the people that would greatly benefit from Medicaid expansion. But of course, Rick Perry and his cronies don’t care about them. I’m still not terribly hopeful that Perry’s obstinacy will have an electoral effect next year. But that day, and that effect, is coming.

UPDATE: More from PDiddie, and the Texas Organizing Project, which was responsible for some of those protesters from yesterday, has more in store for today:

A recent study shows sixty-eight percent of working class Texans don’t know they’d be covered under the health care expansion if it comes to the Lone Star State, but community activists from Texas Organizing Project want to change that. They’re meeting in Austin to lay out their “Find the 1.5” campaign which sets an ambitious goal to identify the 1.5 million Texans that would benefit from Health care Expansion. They’ll be joined by State Senators Rodney Ellis, Wendy Davis and Sylvia Garcia for a press conference laying out the details of the campaign where they’ll canvass clinics, grocery store parking lots and neighborhoods in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley to inform and organize those poised for coverage under the expansion.

“I didn’t know I would qualify for coverage until someone showed me the details,” said Gloria Payne who chairs the health care campaign in Houston. “We’re not going to sit back and let them make decisions for us, we want in on the conversation,” concluded Payne. The campaign will begin it’s neighborhood rollout Wednesday in Houston and the Rio Grande Valley, Thursday in San Antonio and Friday in Dallas.

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[…] unanimously. The Central Fort Bend Chamber of Commerce also passed a resolution. We know that Rick Perry isn’t listening to what the people are saying, but as with the protesters on Monday I’m pretty sure he has to […]